Think Like a Programmer

A curated catalog of (mostly) technical resources every software developer should know, regardless of skill level or tech stack. Based on the community list at https://github.com/mtdvio/every-programmer-should-know by Alexey Migutsky and contributors, licensed CC BY 4.0. The original is openly "highly opinionated, not backed by science" and in no particular order.

When to use

"What should I learn next / what should every developer know about X?"
Requests for a book, talk, paper, course or article on a fundamentals topic.
Explaining a concept (floating point, timezones, Unicode, memory, CAP/distributed clocks, crypto) and wanting to point to the canonical reading.
Career questions: interviews, offer negotiation, equity, remote work, resume.
"Where can I practice coding / prepare for interviews?"

How to use

Match the question to one or more sections of the catalog below.
Recommend 2-4 resources, not the whole section. For each, give one line on why it fits and its format (book / video / article / paper / course / site).
Adjust for level: beginners get visual or gentle resources first (Grokking Algorithms, Hello Algo, Learn X in Y Minutes); experienced developers get the deeper or classic material (Introduction to Algorithms, DDIA, Lamport, Out of the Tar Pit).
If the topic is not in the catalog, say so plainly and answer from general knowledge; do not force an unrelated link.
Some links are old and may have moved or died. If web access is available and a link matters, check it before relying on it; otherwise mention that the link may be outdated.
Reply in the user's language; keep resource titles in their original form.
Remind people when helpful that nobody needs to know all of this by heart — it is a map, not a checklist.

Suggested paths (combinations from the catalog)

New to CS: Map of Computer Science → Computer Science Roadmap → Grokking Algorithms → Big O Cheatsheet → Floating Point Guide → Unicode and Character Sets.
Backend / distributed systems: Latency Numbers → Understanding Distributed Systems → Designing Data-Intensive Applications → Fallacies of Distributed Computing → Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events → Jepsen.
Writing better code: The Art of Readable Code → Clean Code / Code Complete → Working Effectively with Legacy Code → Out of the Tar Pit → Simple Made Easy.
Interview prep: Tech Interview Handbook → Cracking the Coding Interview → LeetCode / Codility → How To Interview As a Developer Candidate → Ten Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer.
Security basics: OWASP Top 10 → Portswigger Academy → Hashing, Encryption and Encoding → Cryptographic Right Answers → Rolling Your Own Crypto (why not to).

Catalog

Introduction

Map of Computer Science (video) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzJ46YA_RaA
40 Key Computer Science Concepts Explained in Layman's Terms (article) — http://carlcheo.com/compsci
Computer Science Roadmap (article) — https://roadmap.sh/computer-science
Community-driven Roadmaps for Developers (site) — https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap

Falsehoods

Awesome Falsehoods (list) — https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood — falsehoods programmers believe about strings, addresses, names, numbers, emails, timezones, dates and more.

Algorithms

Big O Cheatsheet (site) — http://bigocheatsheet.com/
Computer Science Distilled (book) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34189798-computer-science-distilled
Grokking Algorithms (book) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22847284-grokking-algorithms-an-illustrated-guide-for-programmers-and-other-curio
Introduction to Algorithms (book) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/108986.Introduction_to_Algorithms
Algorithms Visualization (site) — https://www.cs.usfca.edu/~galles/visualization/Algorithms.html
Algorithms for Competitive Programming (site) — https://cp-algorithms.com/

Data Structures

Hello Algo (book) — https://www.hello-algo.com/en/chapter_preface/about_the_book/
UC Berkeley Data Structures Course (video/course) — https://sp19.datastructur.es/
Foundations of Data Structures, edX (course) — https://www.edx.org/course/foundations-data-structures-iitbombayx-cs213-1x-0
Data Structures, Coursera (course) — https://www.coursera.org/learn/data-structures
Mathematics for Computer Science, Eric Lehman et al. (book, PDF) — https://people.csail.mit.edu/meyer/mcs.pdf

Numbers

How to Count (book) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12093869-how-to-count
Floating Point Guide (article) — http://floating-point-gui.de/
What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic (article) — https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html
Basic Number Theory Every Programmer Should Know (article) — https://www.codechef.com/wiki/tutorial-number-theory/

Strings

Unicode and Character Sets, Joel Spolsky (article) — https://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
Homoglyphs (tool) — https://github.com/codebox/homoglyph/
Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (site) — http://cldr.unicode.org/
ASCII (video) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1Sf1IhA0j4
UTF-8 (video) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLBtrd9Ar28

Latency

Interactive Latency Infographics (site) — https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_latency.html
Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know (article) — https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832

Time

Some Notes About Time (article) — https://unix4lyfe.org/time/
The Problem with Timezones (video) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY

Memory

What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory, Ulrich Drepper (article series) — https://lwn.net/Articles/250967/ — full paper PDF: https://akkadia.org/drepper/cpumemory.pdf

Security

Secure Programming HOWTO, David Wheeler (book) — https://www.dwheeler.com/secure-programs/
Rolling Your Own Crypto (article) — http://loup-vaillant.fr/articles/rolling-your-own-crypto
Cryptographic Right Answers (article) — https://gist.github.com/tqbf/be58d2d39690c3b366ad
An Open Letter to Developers Everywhere (About Cryptography) (article) — https://gist.github.com/paragonie-scott/e9319254c8ecbad4f227
Foundations of Security: What Every Programmer Needs to Know (book) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/128003.Foundations_of_Security
OWASP Top 10 (reference) — https://owasp.org/www-project-top-ten — the standard list of web application vulnerabilities.
PortSwigger Web Security Academy (labs) — https://portswigger.net — hands-on web security labs.
Web Application Exploits and Defenses, Google Gruyere (labs) — https://google-gruyere.appspot.com/part1
Hashing, Encryption and Encoding (article) — https://www.integralist.co.uk/posts/hashing-and-encryption/

UX / Usability

Don't Make Me Think (book) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18197267-don-t-make-me-think-revisited
Inventing on Principle, Bret Victor (video) — https://vimeo.com/906418692

SEO

What Every Programmer Should Know About SEO (article) — https://katemats.com/blog/what-every-programmer-should-know-about-seo

Architecture

A Field Guide to Boxology (paper) — https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~cs562/s98/pdf/Boxology.pdf
Out of the Tar Pit (paper) — https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master/design/out-of-the-tar-pit.pdf
No Silver Bullet, Fred Brooks (paper) — http://www.cs.unc.edu/techreports/86-020.pdf
Growing a Language, Guy Steele (video) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0
CQRS and Event Sourcing (video) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHGkaShoyNs
Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby (book) — https://www.poodr.com/
Evolutionary Software Architectures (video) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CglSFhwbI3s
System Design Primer (guide) — https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer
How JavaScript Works, parts 1-4 (articles) — https://medium.com/sessionstack-blog/how-does-javascript-actually-work-part-1-b0bacc073cf
Entity-Component-System Architecture with Unity by Example (video) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNTaC-JWmdI

Code Design

Programming Principles Wiki (site) — http://www.principles-wiki.net/

Engineering Philosophy

Category Theory in Life (video) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho7oagHeqNc
Simple Made Easy, Rich Hickey (video) — https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
Speed in Software Development (article) — https://www.targetprocess.com/articles/speed-in-software-development/
#NoEstimates (video) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVBlnCTu9Ms
The Myth of the Genius Programmer (video) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SARbwvhupQ
Making Badass Developers, Kathy Sierra (video) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKTxC9pl-WM
The Ten Rules of a Zen Programmer (article) — https://www.zenprogrammer.org/en/10-rules-of-a-zen-programmer.html
The Mythical 10x Programmer, antirez (article) — http://antirez.com/news/112
The Debugging Mindset (article) — https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3068754
The Future of Programming, Bret Victor (video) — http://worrydream.com/dbx/
The Good Software Development Manifesto (article) — https://www.infoworld.com/article/3214481/application-development/the-good-software-development-manifesto.html
All the Little Things, Sandi Metz (video) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years, Peter Norvig (article) — https://norvig.com/21-days.html

Practices

Working Effectively with Legacy Code (book) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44919.Working_Effectively_with_Legacy_Code
The Art of Readable Code (book) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8677004-the-art-of-readable-code
Code Complete (book) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4845.Code_Complete
Clean Code (book) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3735293-clean-code
Test Driven Development: By Example (book) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/387190.Test_Driven_Development
Going To Production Checklist (checklist) — https://github.com/mr-mig/going-to-production
Release It! (book) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1069827.Release_It_
Professor Frisby's Mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Programming (book) — https://mostly-adequate.gitbook.io/mostly-adequate-guide/
SICP: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (book) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43713.Structure_and_Interpretation_of_Computer_Programs
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Turtle (article) — https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/13-ways-of-looking-at-a-turtle-3/
Programming Paradigms for Dummies, Peter Van Roy (paper) — https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/VanRoyChapter.pdf
Learn X in Y Minutes (site) — https://learnxinyminutes.com/ — condensed basics of a language.
Hyperpolyglot (site) — http://hyperpolyglot.org/ — side-by-side feature comparison of similar languages.
Pomodoro for Programmers (article) — https://medium.com/@mr_mig_by/pomodoro-for-programmers-d6568dd1e6fc
Site Reliability Engineering, Google (book, free online) — https://sre.google/sre-book/table-of-contents/

Career

Levels.fyi (site) — https://www.levels.fyi — salary data across tech companies.
10 Things Every Programmer Should Know for Their First Job (article) — http://www.applematters.com/article/10-things-every-programmer-should-know-for-their-first-job/
How Much Do Software Engineers Really Make in Each City? (article) — https://www.codementor.io/blog/best-cities-software-engineer-earnings-271vpf599k
Software Engineering 101 (slides) — https://slides.com/mr-mig/se101
The Passionate Programmer (book) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6399113-the-passionate-programmer
Soft Skills: The Software Developer's Life Manual (book) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23232941-soft-skills
The Complete Software Developer's Career Guide (book) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35674293-the-complete-software-developer-s-career-guide
Programming Beyond Practices (book) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29895093-programming-beyond-practices
Ten Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer (article) — https://medium.com/free-code-camp/ten-rules-for-negotiating-a-job-offer-ee17cccbdab6
How To Interview As a Developer Candidate (article) — https://medium.freecodecamp.com/how-to-interview-as-a-developer-candidate-b666734f12dd
How To Get a Tech Job Abroad Faster (article) — https://relocate.me/blog/job-relocation/landing-a-tech-job-abroad-7-simple-tips/
How To Be a STAR Engineer (paper) — http://vlsicad.ucsd.edu/Research/Advice/star_engineer.pdf
TL;DR Stock Options (archived site) — https://web.archive.org/web/20190304234515/https://tldroptions.io/
The Open Guide to Equity Compensation (guide) — https://github.com/jlevy/og-equity-compensation
Equity 101 for Startup Employees (article) — https://blog.carta.com/equity-101-stock-option-basics/
Cracking the Coding Interview (book) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25707092-cracking-the-coding-interview
Everything You Need to Know to Get the Job (guide) — https://github.com/kdn251/interviews
Tech Interview Handbook (guide) — https://github.com/yangshun/tech-interview-handbook
What You Should Know as a Founder of a Software Company (article) — https://qotoqot.com/blog/founder-skills/
Pramp, mock interviews (site) — https://www.pramp.com/
97 Things Every Programmer Should Know (book, free) — https://github.com/97-things/97-things-every-programmer-should-know
A Philosophy of Software Design, John Ousterhout, Talks at Google (video) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmSAYlu0NcY
Resume: CV Compiler (tool) — https://cvcompiler.com/

Open Source

Learn How to Use Git and GitHub (guide) — https://www.deployhq.com/git
Choose an Open Source License (site) — https://choosealicense.com/
TLDRLegal, software licenses explained (site) — https://tldrlegal.com/
How Open Source Licenses Work (article) — https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-open-source-licenses-work-and-how-to-add-them-to-your-projects-34310c3cf94

Remote Work

Remotive: startups hiring remotely (list) — https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TLJSlNxCbwRNxy14Toe1PYwbCTY7h0CNHeer9J0VRzE/htmlview
Remote Working List for Developers (list) — https://github.com/georgemandis/remote-working-list
NomadList (site) — https://nomadlist.com/
The Ultimate Guide to Remote Work, Zapier (book) — https://zapier.com/learn/remote-work/
Awesome Remote Job (list) — https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job

Problem Solving

The Art and Craft of Problem Solving (book) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/593458.The_Art_and_Craft_of_Problem_Solving
How to Solve It, George Pólya (book) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/192221.How_to_Solve_It

Soft Skills

Difficult Conversations (book) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/774088.Difficult_Conversations
Crucial Conversations (book) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15014.Crucial_Conversations
How to Win Friends and Influence People (book) — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4865.How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People

Mental Health

Awesome Mental Health (list) — https://github.com/dreamingechoes/awesome-mental-health — articles and resources on mental health in the software industry.

Papers on Programming

Papers We Love (collection) — https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love
The Morning Paper (blog) — https://blog.acolyer.org/
Go To Statement Considered Harmful, Dijkstra (paper) — https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.pdf
arXiv (preprints) — https://arxiv.org/

Free Books

Free Programming Books (list) — https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-books

Services and Tools

Free For Dev (list) — https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev
Public APIs (list) — https://github.com/abhishekbanthia/Public-APIs
The Noun Project (icons) — https://thenounproject.com/
Simple Icons (brand icons) — https://simpleicons.org/
Learn Anything (learning maps) — https://learn-anything.xyz/
Replit (online IDE) — https://replit.com/

Where to Look for Further Info

freeCodeCamp — https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/
GeeksforGeeks — https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/
DEV Community — https://dev.to/
Stack Overflow — https://stackoverflow.com/
DZone — https://dzone.com/

Coding Practice Sites

Competitive programming: Codeforces (https://codeforces.com/), AtCoder (https://atcoder.jp/), CodeChef (https://www.codechef.com), SPOJ (https://spoj.com/), TopCoder (https://www.topcoder.com/), CS Academy (https://csacademy.com/), ICPC Problem Archive (https://icpc.kattis.com/), Project Euler (https://projecteuler.net/)
Interview prep: LeetCode (https://leetcode.com/), HackerRank (https://hackerrank.com/), Codility (https://www.codility.com/), CodeSignal (https://codesignal.com/), InterviewBit (https://www.interviewbit.com/), Interview Cake (https://www.interviewcake.com/), LintCode (https://www.lintcode.com/), Coderbyte (https://coderbyte.com/), HackerEarth (https://hackerearth.com/), Codemia (https://codemia.io/)
Practice and katas: Exercism (https://exercism.org/), Codewars (https://codewars.com/), CodinGame (https://www.codingame.com/), LabEx (https://labex.io/), Codebattle (https://codebattle.hexlet.io/), uCoder (https://ucoder.com.br)

Learning Through Games

Robocode — https://robocode.sourceforge.io/
Elevator Saga — https://play.elevatorsaga.com/
Untrusted — https://alexnisnevich.github.io/untrusted/
CSS Diner — https://flukeout.github.io/
CodeCombat — https://codecombat.com/

Platform Engineering

A discipline grown out of DevOps and SRE: building self-service tools and workflows (often an Internal Developer Platform) to reduce developers' cognitive load and streamline the path to production.

What is platform engineering? — Microsoft Learn: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/platform-engineering/what-is-platform-engineering ; Atlassian: https://www.atlassian.com/developer-experience/platform-engineering
Internal Developer Platform (IDP) — https://internaldeveloperplatform.org/what-is-an-internal-developer-platform/ ; Atlassian guide: https://www.atlassian.com/developer-experience/internal-developer-platform
Golden Paths (paved roads) — Spotify/Backstage: https://backstage.spotify.com/learn/onboarding-software-to-backstage/setting-up-software-templates/11-spotify-templates/ ; Red Hat: https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/devops/golden-paths

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